Colors: Passages through Art, Asia and Nature

An American artist discovers how to make organic colors from plants in a small shop in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She learns to make inks by hand, from indigo, herbs and bark. This process becomes a metaphor for understanding nature, art and life. Beginning to paint with natural color, along with other artists from India and Bangladesh, allows powerful natural forces and patterns to emerge in her paintings. These paintings become the basis for her work in the Indigo Show. In the workshop where color is made, the ingredients take on an almost mythic presence, where process and timing emerge as key ingredients in ancient craft. Living color, color made from sustainable sources, opens her to an awareness of plants and herbs, and their backgrounds. This mysterious process helps her to reach back into the past, to other countries, history and her own life. This richly textured and engaging memoir of color will appeal to artists, naturalists and Asia enthusiasts. Artists will learn to use plants in new and traditional ways. In chapters such as Summer Meadow – Bay – Curry – Basil – Apple Trees – Mint, the artist shares her memories of color, traced through gardens, the use of herbs, and travel. The history of colors unravels the shadowy story of Indigo in Bengal, and the pre-Civil war American South. She shows readers the slow, careful process of making color from natural materials, musing on nature, art and the way to a balanced life. The book offers reflections on using herbs to sustain health, color in art, enlightening encounters with plants, and the lessons left us by pre-industrial attitudes. In Colors: Passages through Art, Asia and Nature Sutro has created a unique and fascinating study of nature’s processes, the origins of color and the birth of paint.